Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/148

 once before—and then endure weeks of slurs because of it. She could fly up-street and down-street to Ilse’s boarding-house—the girls wouldn’t be in bed yet—as she had likewise done once before, and as no doubt Aunt Ruth would expect her to do now; and then Mary Carswell would tell Evelyn Blake and Evelyn Blake would laugh maliciously and tell it all through the school. Emily had no intention of doing either of these things; she knew from the moment she found the door locked just what she would do. She would walk to New Moon—and stay there! Months of suppressed chafing under Aunt Ruth’s perpetual stings burst into a conflagration of revolt. Emily marched out of the gate, slammed it shut behind her with no Murray dignity but plenty of Starr passion, and started on her seven-mile walk through the midnight. Had it been three times seven she would have started just the same.

So angry was she, and so angry she continued to be, that the walk did not seem long, nor, though she had no wrap save her cloth coat, did she feel the cold of the sharp April night.

The winter’s snow had gone but the bare road was hard-frozen and rough—no dainty footing for the thin kid slippers of Cousin Jimmy’s Christmas box. Emily reflected with what she considered a grim, sarcastic laugh that it was well, after all, that Aunt Ruth had insisted on cashmere stockings and flannel petticoat.

There was a moon that night, but the sky was covered with curdled grey clouds, and the harsh, bleak landscape lay dourly in the pallid grey light. The wind came across it in sudden, moaning gusts. Emily felt with considerable dramatic satisfaction that the night harmonised with her stormy, tragic mood.

She would go back to Aunt Ruth’s that was certain. No matter what Aunt Elizabeth might say—and she say aplenty, no doubt of that—no matter what any one would say. If Aunt Elizabeth would not let her go anywhere else to board she would give up school alto-